LITTLE CHEBE'S STORY
In Paris the common landing is like an additional room, an enlargement of
their abodes, to poor families confined in their too small apartments.
They go there to get a breath of air in summer, and there the women talk
and the children play.
When little Chebe made too much noise in the house, her mother would say
to her: "There there! you bother me, go and play on the landing." And
the child would go quickly enough.
This landing, on the upper floor of an old house in which space had not
been spared, formed a sort of large lobby, with a high ceiling, guarded
on the staircase side by a wrought-iron rail, lighted by a large window
which looked out upon roofs, courtyards, and other windows, and, farther
away, upon the garden of the Fromont factory, which was like a green
oasis among the huge old walls.
There was nothing very cheerful about it, but the child liked it much
better than her own home. Their rooms were dismal, especially when it
rained and Ferdinand did not go out.
With his brain always smoking with new ideas, which unfortunately never
came to anything, Ferdinand Chebe was one of those slothful, project-
devising bourgeois of when there are so many in Paris. His wife, whom he
had dazzled at first, had soon detected his utter insignificance, and had
ended by enduring patiently and with unchanged demeanor his continual
dreams of wealth and the disasters that immediately followed them.
Of the dot of eighty thousand francs which she had brought him, and which
he had squandered in his absurd schemes, only a small annuity remained,
which still gave them a position of some importance in the eyes of their
neighbors, as did Madame Chebe's cashmere, which had been rescued from
every wreck, her wedding laces and two diamond studs, very tiny and very
modest, which Sidonie sometimes begged her mother to show her, as they
lay in the drawer of the bureau, in an old-fashioned white velvet case,
on which the jeweller's name, in gilt letters, thirty years old, was
gradually fading. That was the only bit of luxury in that poor
annuitant's abode.
For a very long time M. Chebe had sought a place which would enable him
to eke out their slender income. But he sought it only in what he called
standing business, his health forbidding any occupation that required him
to be seated.
It seemed that, soon after his marriage, when he was in a flourishing
business and had a horse and tilbury of his own, the little man had had
one day a serious fall. That fall, to which he referred upon every
occasion, served as an excuse for his indolence.
One could not be with M. Chebe five minutes before he would say in a
confidential tone:
"You know of the accident that happened to the Duc d'Orleans?"
And then he would add, tapping his little bald pate "The same thing
happened to me in my youth."
Since that famous fall any sort of office work made him dizzy, and he had
found himself inexorably confined to standing business. Thus, he had
been in turn a broker in wines, in books, in truffles, in clocks, and in
many other things beside. Unluckily, he tired of everything, never
considered his position sufficiently exalted for a former business man
with a tilbury, and, by gradual degrees, by dint of deeming every sort of
occupation beneath him, he had grown old and incapable, a genuine idler
with low tastes, a good-for-nothing.
Artists are often rebuked for their oddities, for the liberties they take
with nature, for that horror of the conventional which impels them to
follow by-paths; but who can ever describe all the absurd fancies, all
the idiotic eccentricities with which a bourgeois without occupation can
succeed in filling the emptiness of his life? M. Chebe imposed upon
himself certain rules concerning his goings and comings, and his walks
abroad. While the Boulevard Sebastopol was being built, he went twice a
day "to see how it was getting on."
No one knew better than he the fashionable shops and the bargains; and
very often Madame Chebe, annoyed to see her husband's idiotic face at the
window while she was energetically mending the family linen, would rid
herself of him by giving him an errand to do. "You know that place, on
the corner of such a street, where they sell such nice cakes. They would
be nice for our dessert."
And the husband would go out, saunter along the boulevard by the shops,
wait for the omnibus, and pass half the day in procuring two cakes, worth
three sous, which he would bring home in triumph, wiping his forehead.
M. Chebe adored the summer, the Sundays, the great footraces in the dust
at Clamart or Romainville, the excitement of holidays and the crowd. He
was one of those who went about for a whole week before the fifteenth of
August, gazing at the black lamps and their frames, and the scaffoldings.
Nor did his wife complain. At all events, she no longer had that chronic
grumbler prowling around her chair for whole days, with schemes for
gigantic enterprises, combinations that missed fire in advance,
lamentations concerning the past, and a fixed determination not to work
at anything to earn money.
She no longer earned anything herself, poor woman; but she knew so well
how to save, her wonderful economy made up so completely for everything
else, that absolute want, although a near neighbor of such impecuniosity
as theirs, never succeeded in making its way into those three rooms,
which were always neat and clean, or in destroying the carefully mended
garments or the old furniture so well concealed beneath its coverings.
Opposite the Chebes' door, whose copper knob gleamed in bourgeois fashion
upon the landing, were two other and smaller ones.
On the first, a visiting-card, held in place by four nails, according to
the custom in vogue among industrial artists, bore the name of
RISLER
DESIGNER OF PATTERNS.
On the other was a small square of leather, with these words in gilt
letters:
MESDAMES DELOBELLE
BIRDS AND INSECTS FOR ORNAMENT.
The Delobelles' door was often open, disclosing a large room with a brick
floor, where two women, mother and daughter, the latter almost a child,
each as weary and as pale as the other, worked at one of the thousand
fanciful little trades which go to make up what is called the 'Articles
de Paris'.
It was then the fashion to ornament hats and ballgowns with the lovely
little insects from South America that have the brilliant coloring of
jewels and reflect the light like diamonds. The Delobelles had adopted
that specialty.
A wholesale house, to which consignments were made directly from the
Antilles, sent to them, unopened, long, light boxes from which, when the
lid was removed, arose a faint odor, a dust of arsenic through which
gleamed the piles of insects, impaled before being shipped, the birds
packed closely together, their wings held in place by a strip of thin
paper. They must all be mounted--the insects quivering upon brass wire,
the humming-birds with their feathers ruffled; they must be cleansed and
polished, the beak in a bright red, claw repaired with a silk thread,
dead eyes replaced with sparkling pearls, and the insect or the bird
restored to an appearance of life and grace. The mother prepared the
work under her daughter's direction; for Desiree, though she was still a
mere girl, was endowed with exquisite taste, with a fairy-like power of
invention, and no one could, insert two pearl eyes in those tiny heads or
spread their lifeless wings so deftly as she. Happy or unhappy, Desiree
always worked with the same energy. From dawn until well into the night
the table was covered with work. At the last ray of daylight, when the
factory bells were ringing in all the neighboring yards, Madame Delobelle
lighted the lamp, and after a more than frugal repast they returned to
their work. Those two indefatigable women had one object, one fixed
idea, which prevented them from feeling the burden of enforced vigils.
That idea was the dramatic renown of the illustrious Delobelle. After he
had left the provincial theatres to pursue his profession in Paris,
Delobelle waited for an intelligent manager, the ideal and providential
manager who discovers geniuses, to seek him out and offer him a role
suited to his talents. He might, perhaps, especially at the beginning,
have obtained a passably good engagement at a theatre of the third order,
but Delobelle did not choose to lower himself.
He preferred to wait, to struggle, as he said! And this is how he
awaited the struggle.
In the morning in his bedroom, often in his bed, he rehearsed roles in
his former repertory; and the Delobelle ladies trembled with emotion when
they heard behind the partition tirades from 'Antony' or the 'Medecin des
Enfants', declaimed in a sonorous voice that blended with the thousand-
and-one noises of the great Parisian bee-hive. Then, after breakfast,
the actor would sally forth for the day; would go to "do his boulevard,"
that is to say, to saunter to and fro between the Chateau d'Eau and the
Madeline, with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, his hat a little
on one side-always gloved, and brushed, and glossy.
That question of dress was of great importance in his eyes. It was one
of the greatest elements of success, a bait for the manager--the famous,
intelligent manager--who never would dream of engaging a threadbare,
shabbily dressed man.
So the Delobelle ladies took good care that he lacked nothing; and you
can imagine how many birds and insects it required to fit out a blade of
that temper! The actor thought it the most natural thing in the world.
In his view, the labors, the privations of his wife and daughter were
not, strictly speaking, for his benefit, but for the benefit of that
mysterious and unknown genius, whose trustee he considered himself to be.
There was a certain analogy between the position of the Chebe family and
that of the Delobelles. But the latter household was less depressing.
The Chebes felt that their petty annuitant existence was fastened upon
them forever, with no prospect of amelioration, always the same; whereas,
in the actor's family, hope and illusion often opened magnificent vistas.
The Chebes were like people living in a blind alley; the Delobelles on a
foul little street, where there was no light or air, but where a great
boulevard might some day be laid out. And then, too, Madame Chebe no
longer believed in her husband, whereas, by virtue of that single magic
word, "Art!" her neighbor never had doubted hers.
And yet for years and years Monsieur Delobelle had been unavailingly
drinking vermouth with dramatic agents, absinthe with leaders of claques,
bitters with vaudevillists, dramatists, and the famous what's-his-name,
author of several great dramas. Engagements did not always follow. So
that, without once appearing on the boards, the poor man had progressed
from jeune premier to grand premier roles, then to the financiers, then
to the noble fathers, then to the buffoons--
He stopped there!
On two or three occasions his friends had obtained for him a chance to
earn his living as manager of a club or a cafe as an inspector in great
warehouses, at the 'Phares de la Bastille' or the 'Colosse de Rhodes.'
All that was necessary was to have good manners. Delobelle was not
lacking in that respect, God knows! And yet every suggestion that was
made to him the great man met with a heroic refusal.
"I have no right to abandon the stage!" he would then assert.
In the mouth of that poor devil, who had not set foot on the boards for
years, it was irresistibly comical. But one lost the inclination to
laugh when one saw his wife and his daughter swallowing particles of
arsenic day and night, and heard them repeat emphatically as they broke
their needles against the brass wire with which the little birds were
mounted:
"No! no! Monsieur Delobelle has no right to abandon the stage."
Happy man, whose bulging eyes, always smiling condescendingly, and whose
habit of reigning on the stage had procured for him for life that
exceptional position of a spoiled and admired child-king! When he left
the house, the shopkeepers on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, with the
predilection of the Parisian for everything and everybody connected with
the theatre, saluted him respectfully. He was always so well dressed!
And then he was so kind, so obliging! When you think that every Saturday
night, he, Ruy Blas, Antony, Raphael in the 'Filles de Maybre,' Andres in
the 'Pirates de la Savane,' sallied forth, with a bandbox under his arm,
to carry the week's work of his wife and daughter to a flower
establishment on the Rue St.-Denis!
Why, even when performing such a commission as that, this devil of a
fellow had such nobility of bearing, such native dignity, that the young
woman whose duty it was to make up the Delobelle account was sorely
embarrassed to hand to such an irreproachable gentleman the paltry
stipend so laboriously earned.
On those evenings, by the way, the actor did not return home to dinner.
The women were forewarned.
He always met some old comrade on the boulevard, some unlucky devil like
himself--there are so many of them in that sacred profession!--whom he
entertained at a restaurant or cafe. Then, with scrupulous fidelity--and
very grateful they were to him--he would carry the rest of the money
home, sometimes with a bouquet for his wife or a little present for
Desiree, a nothing, a mere trifle. What would you have? Those are the
customs of the stage. It is such a simple matter in a melodrama to toss
a handful of louis through the window!
"Ho! varlet, take this purse and hie thee hence to tell thy mistress I
await her coming."
And so, notwithstanding their marvellous courage, and although their
trade was quite lucrative, the Delobelles often found themselves in
straitened circumstances, especially in the dull season of the 'Articles
de Paris.'
Luckily the excellent Risler was at hand, always ready to accommodate his
friends.
Guillaume Risler, the third tenant on the landing, lived with his brother
Frantz, who was fifteen years his junior. The two young Swiss, tall and
fair, strong and ruddy, brought into the dismal, hard-working house
glimpses of the country and of health. The elder was a draughtsman at
the Fromont factory and was paying for the education of his brother, who
attended Chaptal's lectures, pending his admission to the Ecole Centrale.
On his arrival at Paris, being sadly perplexed as to the installation of
his little household, Guillaume had derived from his neighbors, Mesdames
Chebe and Delobelle, advice and information which were an indispensable
aid to that ingenuous, timid, somewhat heavy youth, embarrassed by his
foreign accent and manner. After a brief period of neighborhood and
mutual services, the Risler brothers formed a part of both families.
On holidays places were always made for them at one table or the other,
and it was a great satisfaction to the two exiles to find in those poor
households, modest and straitened as they were, a taste of affection and
family life.
The wages of the designer, who was very clever at his trade, enabled him
to be of service to the Delobelles on rent-day, and to make his
appearance at the Chebes' in the guise of the rich uncle, always laden
with surprises and presents, so that the little girl, as soon as she saw
him, would explore his pockets and climb on his knees.
On Sunday he would take them all to the theatre; and almost every evening
he would go with Messieurs Chebe and Delobelle to a brewery on the Rue
Blondel, where he regaled them with beer and pretzels. Beer and pretzels
were his only vice.
For his own part, he knew no greater bliss than to sit before a foaming
tankard, between his two friends, listening to their talk, and taking
part only by a loud laugh or a shake of the head in their conversation,
which was usually a long succession of grievances against society.
A childlike shyness, and the Germanisms of speech which he never had laid
aside in his life of absorbing toil, embarrassed him much in giving
expression to his ideas. Moreover, his friends overawed him. They had
in respect to him the tremendous superiority of the man who does nothing
over the man who works; and M. Chebe, less generous than Delobelle, did
not hesitate to make him feel it. He was very lofty with him, was M.
Chebe! In his opinion, a man who worked, as Risler did, ten hours a
day, was incapable, when he left his work, of expressing an intelligent
idea. Sometimes the designer, coming home worried from the factory,
would prepare to spend the night over some pressing work. You should
have seen M. Chebe's scandalized expression then!
"Nobody could make me follow such a business!" he would say, expanding
his chest, and he would add, looking at Risler with the air of a
physician making a professional call, "Just wait till you've had one
severe attack."
Delobelle was not so fierce, but he adopted a still loftier tone. The
cedar does not see a rose at its foot. Delobelle did not see Risler at
his feet.
When, by chance, the great man deigned to notice his presence, he had a
certain air of stooping down to him to listen, and to smile at his words
as at a child's; or else he would amuse himself by dazzling him with
stories of actresses, would give him lessons in deportment and the
addresses of outfitters, unable to understand why a man who earned so
much money should always be dressed like an usher at a primary school.
Honest Risler, convinced of his inferiority, would try to earn
forgiveness by a multitude of little attentions, obliged to furnish all
the delicacy, of course, as he was the constant benefactor.
Among these three households living on the same floor, little Chebe,
with her goings and comings, formed the bond of union.
At all times of day she would slip into the workroom of the Delobelles,
amuse herself by watching their work and looking at all the insects, and,
being already more coquettish than playful, if an insect had lost a wing
in its travels, or a humming-bird its necklace of down, she would try to
make herself a headdress of the remains, to fix that brilliant shaft of
color among the ripples of her silky hair. It made Desiree and her
mother smile to see her stand on tiptoe in front of the old tarnished
mirror, with affected little shrugs and grimaces. Then, when she had had
enough of admiring herself, the child would open the door with all the
strength of her little fingers, and would go demurely, holding her head
perfectly straight for fear of disarranging her headdress, and knock at
the Rislers' door.
No one was there in the daytime but Frantz the student, leaning over his
books, doing his duty faithfully. But when Sidonie enters, farewell to
study! Everything must be put aside to receive that lovely creature with
the humming-bird in her hair, pretending to be a princess who had come to
Chaptal's school to ask his hand in marriage from the director.
It was really a strange sight to see that tall, overgrown boy playing
with that little girl of eight, humoring her caprices, adoring her as he
yielded to her, so that later, when he fell genuinely in love with her,
no one could have said at what time the change began.
Petted as she was in those two homes, little Chebe was very fond of
running to the window on the landing. There it was that she found her
greatest source of entertainment, a horizon always open, a sort of vision
of the future toward which she leaned with eager curiosity and without
fear, for children are not subject to vertigo.
Between the slated roofs sloping toward one another, the high wall of the
factory, the tops of the plane-trees in the garden, the many-windowed
workshops appeared to her like a promised land, the country of her
dreams.
That Fromont establishment was to her mind the highest ideal of wealth.
The place it occupied in that part of the Marais, which was at certain
hours enveloped by its smoke and its din, Risler's enthusiasm, his
fabulous tales concerning his employer's wealth and goodness and
cleverness, had aroused that childish curiosity; and such portions as she
could see of the dwelling-houses, the carved wooden blinds, the circular
front steps, with the garden-seats before them, a great white bird-house
with gilt stripes glistening in the sun, the blue-lined coupe standing in
the courtyard, were to her objects of continual admiration.
She knew all the habits of the family: At what hour the bell was rung,
when the workmen went away, the Saturday payday which kept the cashier's
little lamp lighted late in the evening, and the long Sunday afternoon,
the closed workshops, the smokeless chimney, the profound silence which
enabled her to hear Mademoiselle Claire at play in the garden, running
about with her cousin Georges. From Risler she obtained details.
"Show me the salon windows," she would say to him, "and Claire's room."
Risler, delighted by this extraordinary interest in his beloved factory,
would explain to the child from their lofty position the arrangement of
the buildings, point out the print-shop, the gilding-shop, the designing-
room where he worked, the engine-room, above which towered that enormous
chimney blackening all the neighboring walls with its corrosive smoke,
and which never suspected that a young life, concealed beneath a
neighboring roof, mingled its inmost thoughts with its loud,
indefatigable panting.
At last one day Sidonie entered that paradise of which she had heretofore
caught only a glimpse.
Madame Fromont, to whom Risler often spoke of her little neighbor's
beauty and intelligence, asked him to bring her to the children's ball
she intended to give at Christmas. At first Monsieur Chebe replied by a
curt refusal. Even in those days, the Fromonts, whose name was always on
Rider's lips, irritated and humiliated him by their wealth. Moreover, it
was to be a fancy ball, and M. Chebe--who did not sell wallpapers, not
he!--could not afford to dress his daughter as a circus-dancer. But
Risler insisted, declared that he would get everything himself, and at
once set about designing a costume.
It was a memorable evening.
In Madame Chebe's bedroom, littered with pieces of cloth and pins and
small toilet articles, Desiree Delobelle superintended Sidonie's toilet.
The child, appearing taller because of her short skirt of red flannel
with black stripes, stood before the mirror, erect and motionless, in the
glittering splendor of her costume. She was charming. The waist, with
bands of velvet laced over the white stomacher, the lovely, long tresses
of chestnut hair escaping from a hat of plaited straw, all the trivial
details of her Savoyard's costume were heightened by the intelligent
features of the child, who was quite at her ease in the brilliant colors
of that theatrical garb.
The whole assembled neighborhood uttered cries of admiration. While some
one went in search of Delobelle, the lame girl arranged the folds of the
skirt, the bows on the shoes, and cast a final glance over her work,
without laying aside her needle; she, too, was excited, poor child! by
the intoxication of that festivity to which she was not invited. The
great man arrived. He made Sidonie rehearse two or three stately
curtseys which he had taught her, the proper way to walk, to stand, to
smile with her mouth slightly open, and the exact position of the little
finger. It was truly amusing to see the precision with which the child
went through the drill.
"She has dramatic blood in her veins!" exclaimed the old actor
enthusiastically, unable to understand why that stupid Frantz was
strongly inclined to weep.
A year after that happy evening Sidonie could have told you what flowers
there were in the reception rooms, the color of the furniture, and the
music they were playing as she entered the ballroom, so deep an
impression did her enjoyment make upon her. She forgot nothing, neither
the costumes that made an eddying whirl about her, nor the childish
laughter, nor all the tiny steps that glided over the polished floors.
For a moment, as she sat on the edge of a great red-silk couch, taking
from the plate presented to her the first sherbet of her life, she
suddenly thought of the dark stairway, of her parents' stuffy little
rooms, and it produced upon her mind the effect of a distant country
which she had left forever.
However, she was considered a fascinating little creature, and was much
admired and petted. Claire Fromont, a miniature Cauchoise dressed in
lace, presented her to her cousin Georges, a magnificent hussar who
turned at every step to observe the effect of his sabre.
"You understand, Georges, she is my friend. She is coming to play with
us Sundays. Mamma says she may."
And, with the artless impulsiveness of a happy child, she kissed little
Chebe with all her heart.
But the time came to go. For a long time, in the filthy street where the
snow was melting, in the dark hall, in the silent room where her mother
awaited her, the brilliant light of the salons continued to shine before
her dazzled eyes.
"Was it very fine? Did you have a charming time?" queried Madame Chebe
in a low tone, unfastening the buckles of the gorgeous costume, one by
one.
And Sidonie, overcome with fatigue, made no reply, but fell asleep
standing, beginning a lovely dream which was to last throughout her youth
and cost her many tears.
Claire Fromont kept her word. Sidonie often went to play in the
beautiful gravelled garden, and was able to see at close range the carved
blinds and the dovecot with its threads of gold. She came to know all
the corners and hiding-places in the great factory, and took part in many
glorious games of hide-and-seek behind the printing-tables in the
solitude of Sunday afternoon. On holidays a plate was laid for her at
the children's table.
Everybody loved her, although she never exhibited much affection for any
one. So long as she was in the midst of that luxury, she was conscious
of softer impulses, she was happy and felt that she was embellished by
her surroundings; but when she returned to her parents, when she saw the
factory through the dirty panes of the window on the landing, she had an
inexplicable feeling of regret and anger.
And yet Claire Fromont treated her as a friend.
Sometimes they took her to the Bois, to the Tuileries, in the famous
blue-lined carriage, or into the country, to pass a whole week at
Grandfather Gardinois's chateau, at Savigny-sur-Orge. Thanks to the
munificence of Risler, who was very proud of his little one's success,
she was always presentable and well dressed. Madame Chebe made it a
point of honor, and the pretty, lame girl was always at hand to place her
treasures of unused coquetry at her little friend's service.
But M. Chebe, who was always hostile to the Fromonts, looked frowningly
upon this growing intimacy. The true reason was that he himself never
was invited; but he gave other reasons, and would say to his wife:
"Don't you see that your daughter's heart is sad when she returns from
that house, and that she passes whole hours dreaming at the window?"
But poor Madame Chebe, who had been so unhappy ever since her marriage,
had become reckless. She declared that one should make the most of the
present for fear of the future, should seize happiness as it passes, as
one often has no other support and consolation in life than the memory of
a happy childhood.
For once it happened that M. Chebe was right.